Any given mission takes place in the skies above a map of some countryside, often times with friendly or enemy anti-air bases scattered about that can fire at planes. Perhaps because it’s a Sid Meier strategy game, or perhaps because Meier realized touchscreen control rarely lends itself to active, twitch-based gameplay, Ace Patrol is turn-based. Players take turns moving their planes around the map based on the pilots’ available maneuvers. The pilots initially start off with limited mobility, but through gaining levels, open up a wide array of flight maneuvers, from complex loops to evasive dives. Though the maneuver pool quickly opens up, being able to choose between them in a match is rather simple. When a plane is selected, each maneuver is represented by a blue arrow icon in the surrounding hexes on the map. If an arrow represents a different maneuver from another arrow, the two are visually different in an intuitive way; it’s easy enough to figure out which arrow activates which maneuver.

When you are in a position to attack a target, some of the blue maneuvers turn green, which means when you fly to that hex, you’ll also attack the appropriate target. Different maneuvers, distances, and altitudes will affect the strength and accuracy of the attack, as will the type of plane, pilot skills, guns, and upgrades. When a plane takes a certain amount of damage (dependent on the plane type), different parts of the plane will break down, limiting its available maneuvering or firing options.

If one of your pilots should, for example, fall prey to an enemy loop maneuver and suddenly get blown out of the sky from behind, no one dies in this game. Rather, they’ll either crash and sit out a handful of missions while they recover in an infirmary, or they’ll be captured behind enemy lines, returned to you after the year’s missions are complete. There are no replacement pilots, so if you lose enough of your squad, you’ll be at a severe disadvantage on certain missions that require more pilots.

After you master every full loop and Immelman turn, you can ramp up the difficulty for each replay, which adds significant score multipliers as well as more difficult opponents. There are also two multiplayer options — hot pad and network. Hot pad allows two players to go at it by passing the phone or tablet to each other while taking their respective turns, while network multiplayer allows you to play over the internet. However, at the time of this writing, the network mode is bugged and unavailable. The team is aware of this, and is working on what will hopefully be a quick solution.

In terms of structure and replayability, the game is very similar to Pirates!, another Meier classic: when you really think about it, the game is simple enough and a little repetitive, but it’s so much fun that you don’t think about it. Though not nearly as deep as Civilization, Ace Patrol adheres to that classic “just one more turn” Sid Meier mindset that is the backbone to his most popular games. The addition of leaderboards and multiplayer (whenever it gets fixed) will certainly give you something do, and if playing against harder difficulties wasn’t strategic enough, playing against seasoned Sid Meier gamers will certainly provide a fun challenge.

The first year (six missions) of the British campaign is free to play. The rest of the British campaign can be unlocked for $0.99, while the other nations’ full campaigns can be purchased for a total of $3.99. Some alternative plane skins (which come with an extra maneuver or two per nation) can also be purchased for a total of $4.99. Unlike a majority of iOS in-app purchases, Ace Patrol purchases are permanent, so you won’t need to continually spend five or ten bucks restocking some in-theme, in-game currency. The most you’d need to spend on the “full” game is $0.99 for a nation’s full campaign, but a game this good is easily worth the $10 that buying each nation and alternative plane skin would cost in total.

Ace Patrol is available now on iOS, and if you always feel a little let down by phone games after a few days, Sid Meier has finally arrived to show the rest of phone gaming how it’s done.